Here be dragons

 

As published in Off the Edge              

 

Anyone who has visited the older parts of Indonesia’s sprawling capital will probably have seen the historical Stasiun Jakarta Kota and noticed the striking difference between it and its Malaysian cousin, the Stesen Keretapi Kuala Lumpur.

 

Architecturally, Stasiun Jakarta Kota is remarkably uncomplicated compared to the splendour of the Kuala Lumpur station. Another obvious difference between the two is that the one in Jakarta is still very much alive with human activity (and waste) while the one in Kuala Lumpur is, well, quite dead.

 

But things were not always sepi at the Kuala Lumpur station. It was the main railway station linking the capital to the rest of the country from the early 1900s up until it surrendered most of its operations to the new Kuala Lumpur Sentral in 2001.

 

Today, other than to photograph its pretty exterior, the station is a dull place to visit.

There is an art gallery/mini-museum—established perhaps to snare the occasional pedestrian—but this also seems somewhat half-hearted. The gallery-museum is, at the very most, uninspiring except for one particular exhibit: A huge model of the original Sentul railway depot and workshop area.

 

Those of us who know Sentul only for its roti canai and the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (KLPac) might wonder, “Where the heck in Sentul is this? It’s is enormous!” A lot of it has given way to development, and all that is left is guarded behind walls. The famous KLPac building was in fact part of the facility, functioning as a saw mill for our railway lines.

 

Better known today as the Sentul Workshop, the facility has been the heart of our nation’s railway industry. It began operations in 1905 as the central workshop and depot for the Federated Malay States Railway (FMSR), which eventually evolved into the present day Keretapi Tanah Melayu Berhad (KTMB).

 

Until recently, the Sentul Workshop was home to generations of railway families who depended on employment at the facility. It was a huge establishment of 13 acres, and a busy one considering it was where trains were built, fixed and refurbished before they proceeded to serve commuters and businesses on the Malayan peninsular. It brought life to Kuala Lumpur, and to it Sentul owes its epithet: City of Locomotives.

 

Most of us are unaware of the facility’s significance. The very compound into which some of Kuala Lumpur’s middle-class waltzes for their dose of music and plays, was itself once a great war theatre. In 1944, the facility was destroyed by bombs dropped by the very people who helped build it—the British.

 

So vital was the function of the Sentul Workshop that Allied forces deemed it necessary to destroy the Workshop in order to paralyse the Japanese military occupation during the Second World War. Soon after the bombing, and after looting more than 5,000 locomotive carriages from the peninsula (they ended up in Indochina), the Japanese mission to create an “Asia for Asians” ended too. So, back came the British as we restored the Sentul Workshop to its important position in the Malayan railway industry.

 

The Sentul Workshop history is an important one, and likely to be forgotten. Like the Kuala Lumpur station the Sentul Workshop will also cease its operations when the new facility in Perak is completed, and the land on which it stands has been sold to a new owner.

 

But what will become of it? Will it serve as another community centre like the KLPac? Or will it stand in a grand lull, like Stesen Kuala Lumpur? Perhaps it will be “Bok House-ed” and replaced by a Disneyland of condominiums.

 

Whatever its fate, a group of young photographers feel its visual memory should at least be preserved. With permission from KTMB, photographer K. Azril Ismail and his students from the Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) were able to photograph the last vestiges of the original Sentul Workshop.

 

Together with the KLPac, they are staging an exhibition in January to share a glimpse of the historic facility with the public.

——————————————————————————————

 

* Iron Dragons of Malaya on their official website.